The Life and Death of the World's Greatest Alt-Weekly: 'The eXile'

A piece by James Verini in this month’s Vanity Fair profiles the “The eXile” — the now-defunct Russian alt-weekly founded by Mark Ames and bolstered by the early work of Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. The eXile was shut down by Russian authorities in 2008, after a nearly twelve-year run of drugs, debauchery and the best enterprise journalism to come out of Russia since the end of the Cold War.

In its time The Exile was arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia, and Ames and his staff had paid for that fact, or at least for the fact that they were arrogant reprobates, many times before.

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